Parental puzzlesThem is a star-studded memoir of family dysfunction

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, July 3, 2005

Them: A Memoir of Parents is like Star magazine for the literary set. Jampacked with juicy gossip, Francine du Plessix Gray's book about her oh-so-fabulous Russian émigré mother and stepfather is guilty pleasure without the guilt.

In fact, Them is a probing, sometimes heartbreaking look inside the household of Gray's mother, famed hat maker Tatiana du Plessix, and stepfather, Alex Liberman, a sculptor and painter and the editorial director of the growing Condé Nast magazine empire.

Gray's story begins long before she was born, with du Plessix's solo voyage as a young girl from her Russian homeland to Paris, where she lived with aunts and uncles. Even the history of distant relatives is action-packed: A grandfather severed ties with the family and fled to the United States, probably to escape gambling debts; an uncle risked his life on expeditions across the Sahara and Asia; another uncle fell madly in love with a circus acrobat, only to lose her to a trapezist.

Living in Paris, du Plessix met and had a passionate (though unconsummated) love affair with Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, one of the Soviet Union's most treasured poets. Du Plessix inspired several of his poems and considered moving back to Russia to marry him, though ultimately Soviet politics and Mayakovsky's many lovers intervened.

Instead she married Bertrand du Plessix, Gray's father, who was killed fighting with the Free French in World War II. Gray was not told about her father's death until a year later, when one of the many family companions (all with relationships that hovered between staff and friend) broke the news because Gray's mother was afraid to.

Even before her husband's death, du Plessix had fallen in love with Liberman. The two and young Gray spent much of the war living in southern France, then were able to flee to New York, where the couple eventually married. Throughout Gray's childhood, the Libermans shuttled her off to whichever friends or family were available to look after her.

"Some eight hours after arriving in the United States," Gray writes, "I found myself in the third-class carriage of a night train bound for Rochester, New York, being taken by a total stranger, my grandfather, to a city I'd never heard of until that very afternoon, clutching, as my only reassurance, the little suitcase I'd brought from France."

Du Plessix was also notorious for her rude comments and rigid opinions on style.

"Take off raincoat! Eet look like contraceptive!" she yelled at one of Gray's college friends.

"Meeeenk is for football," du Plessix was fond of saying. "Diamonds are for suburbs."

Liberman is even more of an enigma. Devoted to du Plessix, he somehow managed to wait on her hand and foot, even immediately after suffering a heart attack while also running a magazine empire and creating massive sculptures displayed in public spaces across the country, including on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution.

Gray portrays Liberman as warm and loving at home but backstabbing and heartless in the business world. He fired his protégés and turned on his closest friends when they were no longer useful to him.

And as soon as du Plessix died, Liberman did the same to his family. He married his wife's former nurse, moved to Miami and traded in his fussy lifestyle for one overflowing with his new wife's extended Filipino family. Photographs of Gray and her children disappeared from his home, and he ceased talking about his beloved former wife.

Though Gray's reporting on her family's history is exhaustive, her parents remain largely bewildering to her. The reader — and Gray herself, it seems — are left puzzled by why her parents asked the teenage Gray to pose nude for them, by why they were incapable of making sure she got basic nutrition as a child, by their increasing heartlessness in old age.

Now Playing:

Most families are baffling and tinged with hurt on the inside, of course, and perhaps the most remarkable thing is that Gray is able to learn as much as she does about her secretive parents. The mysteries about their behavior make their lives no less compelling.